British Transport Police is nearing the end of a massive
IT overhaul in preparation for a move to new headquarters in Camden
this November.
The project has involved upgrading 1,600 PCs, retiring a mainframe
and replacing networks.
The new systems will be able to provide real-time crime
analysis, which will be vital in helping police respond to any
future terrorist attacks on the UK transport infrastructure,
British Transport Police said.
To enable the transformation, British Transport Police increased
its IT headcount from about 25 people to 40 and embarked on a
number of core IT upgrades.
In July 2004, British Transport Police's IT budget doubled to about
£12m when it came under the authority of the police rather than the
rail industry and was reclassified as a non-departmental public
body. The increased IT budget enabled the force to gain ITIL
accreditation, proving its IT service management competence, said
Andrew Watson, head of technology at British Transport
Police.
A key project was the replacement of 1,600 Hewlett-Packard Windows
NT 4.0 desktop PCs with machines running Windows XP. British
Transport Police used IT reseller DTP to carry out the PC refresh
over a nine-month period.
Another major project was to build a nationwide fast voice/data IP
network. It will switch this on in the third week of October. The
network, from Global Crossing, can carry roughly four times the
traffic at the same cost as before, said Watson.
The roll-out to London Underground was completed in June, Scottish
operations were updated in July, and replacement work in the North
East began at the start of August.
British Transport Police has 100 locations with computing
facilities. These vary from one-man stations to the headquarters
with 360 staff. Seven area HQs have up to 100 staff each.
British Transport Police is now wrestling with the huge challenge
of setting up servers at the new HQ in Camden. It decided to retire
a 10-year-old Fujitsu mainframe, used as the main machine for
recording crimes. The force is currently moving data onto an Oracle
database running on Sun servers, a system due to go live at the HQ
before November, when staff move in.
British Transport Police is building a crime recording system and
command and control centre based on the new servers.
"The existing crime recording system was originally designed as a
data repository and for hard-copy output. In those days, mainframes
were not designed to do real-time analysis, and now the demands are
exceeding its capabilities," said Watson. "This system makes a huge
difference in officers being able to log data and analyse
crimes."
British Transport Police is also looking at expanding its mobile
strategy, using PDAs, laptops and ruggedised military-standard
tablet PCs. "When officers are in the middle of nowhere, you cannot
give them an ordinary GPRS mobile," said Watson.
